Failures
League table of failures - by The Belgian -moral failure -miserable failure -epic failure -cascading failure -failure to anticipate -failure to perceive -failure to carry out a task -commercial failure -emotional failure -process failure -outcome failure -necessary failure -planned obsolescence (built-in failure) -failure to fail (Havisock failure) -structural failure -single point of failure -born failure -white-elephant-type failure -power outage (failure of the electrical kind) -non-event (failure to live up to the hype) -personal failure (nobody left to blame) 1. Introduction to said league table, or The Pervert's Dream of Failed Tumescence Gentlemen of the Society of Tavistocks, Although we personally know the answer to the following murder mystery through the constant grief felt in our bones and our minds, please piece the following facts together and decide for yourselves who is capable of failure beyond all other members. Firstly, let us start with a general observation: moral failure is not only one of the daily specials, it is firmly on the top of the section titled 'mains' of the menu that is the accused’s increasingly smelly life. Sweet desserts are out, bitter aperitifs are in. Red meat/meet is to be substituted by low-carbboard. Calories don't count if they are gifts, and a diet of air makes slim. A few days ago, or weeks (when counting days of sloth), a passivity transpired. One rainy afternoon, we were bundled into a car/wreck of unusual shape and with rust covering more than its combined surface areas (in short, we had to walk in a haze of oxidized metal). The ensemble of characters had been chosen carefully by the otherwise nonchalant driver: two girls and this guy, cast in the role of 'hapless foreigner - to be used as sound board for the more risque stories recited to said females'. Fast forward to later events: what lay in store was not so much the promised beach action in the company of girls in bikinis, but rather an attempt at full-on drowning. The only prescient move on our part was to bring a snorkel (to much initial giggling on the part of all of us oblivious participants in this one-man mental orgy). In order to properly understand the depths/debts of these local events, one can find objective and impartial confirmation of their serial nature on page one of last week's Teesdale Mercury: "Failure to launch, or a bald man's attempt at provocation" - by Reginald Said. "Yesterday, a young, malnourished boy delivered a letter in a smudged, handwritten envelope to the paper’s offices in Bishop Street, Darlo-in-Teesdale. A strange smell filled the cubicle containing the metro desk - the stench of an unqualified, intense series of failures. The yellowish letter of unusual format - a recycled post-it note, no longer sticky - revealed a crudely drawn man's member. It was decided this attempt at provocation was to be met with any response chosen from the following list: -overreact -ignore -repress -burn -lash out A quick trip to the local betting shop was used to decide that only the latter option would be sufficient to undo incurred losses.* During the budget meeting in the board room/ladies', it was decided to redirect all future funds to the completion of said endeavour. "A case of this magnitude is not beyond our reach, although failure cannot be excluded due to our excellent historic record of tolerance in these matters", my boss, Misc. Regs, stated. The matter having been settled, yours truly went on a hunt for his overcoat (I am sure I don’t own one, but it never hurts to look). Further reasoning decided that the crudeness of the drawing could only be directly related to the state of mind of the perverted draftsman (for the initiated this can be qualified as a power-outage at the penile level, repressed, obviously). A second psychological marker was undoubtedly the crooked shank and tiny scrotum, the former hairy, the latter pockmarked (for the detectives who are still reading: note the apparent lack of a bell). It was decided that a man with a verbal penis was to be the main suspect, easily identified by his discourse about said member. Not only a sign of neediness and desperate attention-seeking, it seemed the suspect had reached his sell-by date (planned obsolence).” End of article. However, to pick up our own story: after continuous verbal abuse coming from the suspect's enormous pie-hole (the only developed feature on his bald skull), it all ended in the High Force (a waterfall of cascading failures). "Some would say we have to go deep, some shallow, but we all must end in the waterfall." to paraphrase someone who once smoked, chewed and sniffed all our tobacco. By the side of this imminent watery grave, acts of self-indulgence on the part of the deluded clockmaker/pervert surpassed even his own levels of perversion**, effectively boring his audience of mechanic dolls/victims with his stolen material*** to such a degree that they all jumped into said waterfall. The next part in this story refers to a report from the Durham magistrate’s court, section “miscarriages of justice to decency”. It contains two files: 1. Pathologist’s report: “one foreign male, 26 at most and very handsome in life, stopped breathing due to an abundance of blackish water and failure to anticipate the malfunctioning of a snorkel (it seems to have been transformed into a sex toy by one E.E. Havisock). Two girls hit the water already brain-dead.” 2.Verdict of the judge: The suspect is to be flogged and quartered in five parts by three horses and a goat. His high-pitched wailing must be recorded for posterity. Category:Condemnations